Voter suppression legislation a fitting conclusion to the 2013 legislature

July 29, 2013

State legislators are fast-tracking numerous important and potentially destructive bills as they move to conclude the 2013 session of the North Carolina General Assembly. But the coup de grâce has to be a last-minute, worse-than-anyone-would-have-ever-imagined voter suppression bill that has emerged in the state Senate.

According to nonpartisan good government advocates, the bill includes dozens of disastrous provisions including:

• The end of pre-registration for 16 and 17 year olds

• Elimination of same day voter registration

• A provision allowing voters to be challenged by any registered voter of the county in which they vote rather than just their precinct

• A week sliced off Early Voting

• Elimination of straight party ticket voting

• A provision making the state’s presidential primary date a function of the primary date in South Carolina

• An increase in the maximum campaign contribution to $5,000 (the limit will continue to increase every two years with the Consumer Price Index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics)

• An expansion of the scope of who may examine registration records and challenge voters

• A repeal of out-of-precinct voting

• A repeal of the current mandate for high-school registration drives

• Elimination of flexibility in opening early voting sites at different hours within a county

• A provision making it more difficult to add satellite polling sites for the elderly or voters with disabilities

• The repeal of three public financing programs.

Veteran nonpartisan elections advocate Bob Hall of Democracy North Carolina – the man who did more than any other independent advocate to bring down the corrupt former Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Black – summarized the proposal this way earlier this morning:

“It is breathtaking in scope and radical in purpose. It makes the most sweeping changes to the core parts of our state’s election process in decades. In 57 pages, it redefines and restricts who can vote, where, when and how, while also allowing more money to pour into our elections.”

He went on:

“The substance and process of this legislation demonstrates a complete disrespect of honest voters. It authorizes vigilante partisan “observers” to roam through polling places and creates new barriers at every turn. The bill will drive more people away from the polling booth, either to not vote at all or to use the mail-in absentee process, which we already know if where most fraud occurs.

This is elitist politics at its worse – political bullies rigging the election process for their own narrow interests.”

Hall might have added that, according to preliminary analyses, it is the most ambitious/regressive voter suppression effort in recent American history. If it is passed into law in its present form, the proposal will almost certainly give North Carolina the nation’s strictest election laws and turn back the clock by several decades.

Hall’s analysis also comes just a day after the release of another report panning a less-onerous voter ID proposal which showed that it could negatively impact up to 5 percent of the state’s voters.

Of course, in many respects, there’s a certain evil symmetry to the proposal and an aptness to its emergence in the waning hours of the 2013 session. For the past six months, conservative state leaders have been doing their worst to drag North Carolina back into the mid-20th Century. In area after area, the General Assembly and Governor McCrory have been using banana republic tactics to enact radical, half-baked proposals cooked up in the “think tanks” funded by the state budget director that will erase decades of uneven and frequently painstaking progress.

Now, like thieves covering their tracks, they’re doing everything in their power (in every way they can imagine) to make sure they’re not caught or punished for their actions by limiting the opportunity of voters who might disapprove.

It is a sad and dark moment in state history. Let’s hope caring and thinking people act to reject this treacherous deed as forcefully and rapidly as possible.

Rob Schofield is the Director of Research and Policy Development at N.C. Policy Watch.